"Generally, US foreign policy is remarkably consistent and cohesive, a deadly success, given the interests it represents. Those who see it as repeatedly befuddled are themselves revealing their own befuddlement.

Sometimes the policymakers themselves seize upon incompetence as a cover.[For example, when the Iran-Contra affair was discovered, President Reagan pleaded incompetence.] His admission of incompetence was eagerly embraced by various analysts and pundits who prefer to see their leaders as suffering from innocent ignorance rather than deliberate deception. Subsequent testimony by his subordinates, however, revealed that Reagan was not as dumb as he was pretending to be, and that he had played an active and deciding role in the entire Iran-contra affair.

***

No less a political personage than Henry Kissinger repeatedly pretended to innocent ignorance and incompetence when confronted with the dirty role he and his cohorts played . . . ."

This strategy of "playing dumb" and acting incompetent has, in fact, long been employed by leaders on both the left and the right. Many liberals and old fashioned conservatives have been suckered by this dumb and dumber act.

***

Let's take a look at the actual history of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld for insight into whether they are incompetent leaders.

Remember how the TV character Detective Columbo pretended he was bumbling and dumb, so that people would underestimate him? Or remember the TV show Matlock, where Andy Griffith pretended to be a slow-witted country lawyer in order to put people off their guard?

I would argue that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have also used this same trick: playing dumb.

Prominent liberal figures and 0ld-fashioned conservatives have tried to warn others of the ploy. For example, liberal guru George Lakoff wrote an article in 2006 called "Bush Is Not Incompetent" which demonstrates that the Bush administration has been incredibly successful in implementing its agenda (the article is well worth reading for its evidence that Bush is not incompetent; however, I believe Lakoff confuses neoconservatism with true conservatism).

Obama - like Bush before him - also appears to be totally incompetent with regard to the economy. He hasn't been able to rein in the giant banks or significantly lower unemployment. Obama is following disproven models, and has appointed economists who either helped cause the crisis in the first place, or who have drunk the kool-aid of failed economic theory.

And as I pointed out last year, top economists running the Fed and advising Obama don't miss the dangers to the economy due to negligence, but because they are rewarded for doing so:

Most economists don't exercise any independent thinking because economists are trained to ignore reality:

As I have repeatedly noted, mainstream economists and financial advisors have been using faulty and unrealistic models for years. See this, this, this, this, this and this.

And I have pointed out numerous times that economists and advisors have a financial incentive to use faulty models. For example, I pointed out last month:

The decision to use faulty models was an economic and political choice, because it benefited the economists and those who hired them.

For example, the elites get wealthy during booms and they get wealthy during busts. Therefore, the boom-and-bust cycle benefits them enormously, as they can trade both ways.

Specifically, as Simon Johnson, William K. Black and others point out, the big boys make bucketloads of money during the booms using fraudulent schemes and knowing that many borrowers will default. Then, during the bust, they know the government will bail them out, and they will be able to buy up competitors for cheap and consolidate power. They may also bet against the same products they are selling during the boom (more here), knowing that they'll make a killing when it busts.

But economists have pretended there is no such thing as a bubble. Indeed, BIS slammed the Fed and other central banks for blowing bubbles and then using "gimmicks and palliatives" afterwards.

It is not like economists weren't warning about booms and busts. Nobel prize winner Hayek and others were, but were ignored because it was "inconvenient" to discuss this "impolite" issue.

Likewise, the entire Federal Reserve model is faulty, benefiting the banks themselves but not the public.

The Federal Reserve, through its extensive network of consultants, visiting scholars, alumni and staff economists, so thoroughly dominates the field of economics that real criticism of the central bank has become a career liability for members of the profession, an investigation by the Huffington Post has found.

This dominance helps explain how, even after the Fed failed to foresee the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, the central bank has largely escaped criticism from academic economists. In the Fed's thrall, the economists missed it, too.

"The Fed has a lock on the economics world," says Joshua Rosner, a Wall Street analyst who correctly called the meltdown. "There is no room for other views, which I guess is why economists got it so wrong."

The problems of a massive debt overhang were also thoroughly documented by Minsky, but mainstream economists pretended that debt doesn't matter.

And - even now - mainstream economists are STILL willfully ignoring things like massive leverage, hoping that the economy can be pumped back up to super-leveraged house-of-cards levels.

As the Wall Street Journal article notes:

As they did in the two revolutions in economic thought of the past century, economists are rediscovering relevant work.

It is only "rediscovered" because it was out of favor, and it was only out of favor because it was seen as unnecessarily crimping profits by, for example, arguing for more moderation during boom times.

The powers-that-be do not like economists who say "Boys, if you don't slow down, that bubble is going to get too big and pop right in your face". They don't want to hear that they can't make endless money using crazy levels of leverage and 30-to-1 levels of fractional reserve banking, and credit derivatives. And of course, they don't want to hear that the Federal Reserve is a big part of the problem.

Indeed, the Journal and the economists it quotes seem to be in no hurry whatsoever to change things:

The quest is bringing financial economists -- long viewed by some as a curiosity mostly relevant to Wall Street -- together with macroeconomists. Some believe a viable solution will emerge within a couple of years; others say it could take decades.

I think that the question that needs to be asked is how the discipline was untracked and trivialized from its classical flowering? How did it become marginalized and trivialized, taking for granted the social structures and dynamics that should be the substance and focal point of its analysis?...

To answer this question, my book describes the "intellectual engineering" that has turned the economics discipline into a public relations exercise for the rentier classes criticized by the classical economists: landlords, bankers and monopolists. It was largely to counter criticisms of their unearned income and wealth, after all, that the post-classical reaction aimed to limit the conceptual "toolbox" of economists to become so unrealistic, narrow-minded and self-serving to the status quo. It has ended up as an intellectual ploy to distract attention away from the financial and property dynamics that are polarizing our world between debtors and creditors, property owners and renters, while steering politics from democracy to oligarchy...

[As one Nobel prize winning economist stated,] "In pointing out the consequences of a set of abstract assumptions, one need not be committed unduly as to the relation between reality and these assumptions."

This attitude did not deter him from drawing policy conclusions affecting the material world in which real people live. These conclusions are diametrically opposed to the empirically successful protectionism by which Britain, the United States and Germany rose to industrial supremacy.

Typical of this now widespread attitude is the textbook Microeconomics by William Vickery, winner of the 1997 Nobel Economics Prize:

"Economic theory proper, indeed, is nothing more than a system of logical relations between certain sets of assumptions and the conclusions derived from them... The validity of a theory proper does not depend on the correspondence or lack of it between the assumptions of the theory or its conclusions and observations in the real world. A theory as an internally consistent system is valid if the conclusions follow logically from its premises, and the fact that neither the premises nor the conclusions correspond to reality may show that the theory is not very useful, but does not invalidate it. In any pure theory, all propositions are essentially tautological, in the sense that the results are implicit in the assumptions made."

Such disdain for empirical verification is not found in the physical sciences. Its popularity in the social sciences is sponsored by vested interests. There is always self-interest behind methodological madness. That is because success requires heavy subsidies from special interests, who benefit from an erroneous, misleading or deceptive economic logic. Why promote unrealistic abstractions, after all, if not to distract attention from reforms aimed at creating rules that oblige people actually to earn their income rather than simply extracting it from the rest of the economy?

***

Not only have our government "leaders" in the Fed, Treasury, Congress and White House ignored the real world, they have taunted it - like monkeys who pull the tail of the lion and then [act] surprised when the lion attacks:

The New York Times reported ... that we sent in 36 U.S. Special Forces troops to get Osama bin Laden when we knew he was in Tora Bora. By contrast, we sent nearly 150,000 soldiers to get Saddam Hussein. In case you're keeping count at home, we got Saddam and we didn't get Osama. What does that tell you about this administration’s priorities? This goes beyond incompetence. If you send only 36 soldiers to get somebody in the middle of Afghanistan, it means you don’t want to get him...

Osama had about 1,500-2,000 well-armed, well-trained men in the region. 36 guys to get 2,000? Why would we let ourselves be outgunned like that?...

There is an inescapable fact – if you put this little effort into capturing someone, it means you don’t want to capture him.

***

If people inside the administration actually held back from capturing Osama bin Laden when we had him cornered, it borders on treason.

And former Federal Prosecutor, Office of Special Investigations, U.S. Department of Justice under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan; former U.S. Army Intelligence officer, and currently a widely-sought media commentator on terrorism and intelligence services (John Loftus) says:

The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defense of incompetence.

Postscript: If you still don't believe a bumbler like Bush could have really been a rascal, remember that Colin Powell's Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson said:

The vice president and the secretary of defense created a "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" that hijacked U.S. foreign policy.

(Just like they've hijacked foreign policy in the U.S. for nearly 40 years.)

Similarly, if you think Obama is incompetent in fixing the economy and reining in Wall Street, remember that Harold Bradley - who oversees almost $2 billion in assets as chief investment officer at the Kauffman Foundation - said:

“We are in a cabal... five or six players ... own the regulatory apparatus. everybody is afraid to regulate them"

9 comments:

Such botching occurs for the sake of an agenda- in the following case to ensure that I-95 go nowhere near Catholic University of Ameirca and the Masonic-Eastern Star property at 6000 New Hampshire Avenue NE:

What about the "failure" of NORAD on 9/11? I put failure in quotes because I don't even know what the official explanation for what happened on that day is. As much as it wouldn't surprise me that the US gov had advance knowledge of 9/11, I also can't help but think that people overlook the possibility of incompetence on that day. What little I've read dismisses this because no one was fired. However, wouldn't it be possible to argue that no one was fired because no one wanted to admit incompetence? Just wondering, thanks for the thoughtful blog posts.

You can be incompetent *and* evil. Consider that Bush/Cheney had a plan for invading and conquering Iraq. An evil plan. Yet it was also an incompetent plan, one doomed to failure.

Likewise, the looting of the economy for the superrich banksters is fundamentally incompetent, as they are "killing the goose that laid the golden eggs" and will end up with nothing in 5-10 years. But it is also evil, and short-term competent, just not competent in the long term.

You've been putting out some super-excellent articles, lately, GW! I cited you twice on my blog entry "Why I believed the official story about the attacks of 9-11" (you debunked them both ...)

There's no doubt in my mind that two of the major environmental disasters in our time were met with *more* than inexcusable incompetence ... Bush's reaction to Katrina and Obabma's/BP's reaction to the Gulf oil "spill." I think there's malicious intent behind both those fiascoes.

I believe people in power do pretend to be stupid to get what they want.My example isn't political, but it demonstrates the same dynamic.

I had to get approval for medication through my insurance company. For expensive medications, they needed preapproval, and that meant filling out forms and sending it to them. Long story short, months later, I'm on the phone with this representative from the insurance company and she is telling me they did not receive it, and to send the forms again. She was very sharp, and had answer to everything -- I could tell she was very intelligent.

I had already sent them preapproval forms 3 times. Once via registered mail. Once via email. And the 3rd time via fax. How could they have just lost them?

She told me "we don't know where they are, send them again". I then asked her why her company would just lose important documents, and not know where they were. She told me they could have lost them in the office.

She was playing dumb -- she was trying to act incompetent. I knew something wasn't right.After talking with her and getting no where for a half hour, I played hard ball. I told her the next company I start a job with, if they happen to have the same benefits plan/insurance company I would make sure to see it they switch to another provider. And I hung up.

4 hours later, I got a call. It was the sharp-tongued manager who told me 5 thousand times they "didn't know where my forms were, send them again". She told me they have the forms, and I would be approved for the medication.

No, they have been taught well. They understand that Washington DC is a corporation which is separate from the Republic. Our voice under the Constitution has been "quieted" due to the War Powers Act which the corporation is usurping the authority of the people without the people's consent. This is the same acts foisted upon an unsuspecting citizenry back in the 1800's.

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